Hetq.amwrote: The OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) team of journalists has uncovered details about the multi-million dollar betting business of Turkish businessman Halil Falyalı.
Falyalı’s former financial director Cemil Önal told reporters that his partner from Armenia was Vigen Badalyan, who is one of the shareholders of the giant in the online gaming and betting business, Soft Construct. According to Önal, Badalyan’s company provided software for numerous betting sites in Turkey, and Falyalı was the sponsor and supporter of the Armenian businessman’s activities in Turkey.
Badalyan’s legal team denied Önal’s claims. Soft Construct LLC was established in 2014, and its 100% shareholder was Soft Construct Limited, a company registered in the Isle of Man, whose The sole shareholder is Boston Nominees Limited, a company registered in Maine. In the latest annual report of Soft Construct Limited, one of the directors is Vigen Badalyan. In 2020, brothers Vigen and Vahe Badalyan became shareholders in Soft Construct LLC with 50% shares each. In 2021 The company was reorganized into "Soft Construct" CJSC. "Soft Construct", in addition to accepting bets, offers services for creating betting sites and games, and technologically innovative solutions to make the gaming industry easier to organize. "Soft Construct"'s Vbet brand is known to almost everyone in Armenia.
Vigen Badalyan presents the brands they have created on his website. But this brand has long crossed the borders of Armenia. Vbet is represented all over the world through offices opened in different countries. Vbet is advertised at football matches, various concerts, and competitions.
Vbet.com operates through Radon B.V., a company registered in the Caribbean island state of Curacao and licensed to operate gambling (Curacao, an offshore zone, is an autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and the operator-organizer of vbet.am is the Armenian Soft Construct CJSC.
The Badalyans deny their connection with the Falyali Halil Falyali was a Turkish Cypriot businessman. On February 8, 2022, a group of armed men attacked his car.
The driver, Murat Demirtaş, was killed in the car, and Falyali, who suffered 16 gunshot wounds, died in a Nicosia hospital. Falyali was a well-known figure with connections to Turkish and Turkish Cypriot officials, which made him the kingpin of gambling in Turkey. The United States indicted Falyali and his brother, Hüsnü Falyali, in 2015 on charges of laundering money from drug trafficking.
But Falyali has never been arrested and appears to have had no serious problems in northern Cyprus (read OCCRP’s investigation to learn more).
OCCRP spoke with Cemil Önal, who was Falyali’s chief financial officer from late 2013 until November 2021. He quit his job a few months before Falyali's murder. He is currently in a Dutch prison. Onal said that Halil Falyali and Vigen Badalyan met in 2016. According to him, Badalyan offered Falyali 30 percent of his earnings in Turkey in exchange for not "harassing" his people.
Onal said that Badalyan's BetConstruct, which creates and maintains betting and gaming websites in Turkey, received 18 percent of the websites' income every month.which was then divided 70-30 by Vigen and Halil. According to Onal, the number of BetConstruct websites in Turkey is 150-200. “This guy from Armenia sells infrastructure to the whole world,” Onal said of Badalyan, “about 5,000 websites in the world get their infrastructure from BetConstruct. Why from Armenia? Because the labor there is very cheap… This man, Vigen Badalyan, is the godfather of the industry.”
In response to OCCRP’s inquiry, Soft Construct’s legal team stated that neither Vigen Badalyan nor the company has any business relationship and has not made any financial transactions with Halil Falyali, his family or any related parties. “The claim that Falyali provided “sponsorship” for BetConstruct’s clients in return for receiving preferential financial treatment (meaning the 30 percent cut mentioned by Onal) is false. share - ed.), is completely false and baseless, - Soft Construct reported, adding, - we are not aware of the financial arrangements made by Cemil Onal, and we dispute their accuracy."
Onal also said that Vigen Badalyan only communicated with Halil, his brother Husnu, and himself from Falyali's circle by phone and Skype. He claimed that in 2015, Badalyan and Husnu Falyali were photographed together at a gaming exhibition in London. In response, Soft Construct's legal team told OCCRP that commercial events are industry-specific public gatherings attended by many individuals.
"An individual's presence at an event does not in itself imply a business relationship, and any such inference may be misleading and speculative. Soft Construct has no business relationship with Husnu Falyali.
We are not aware of any direct or indirect professional relationship with him."
